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Citizens Bank Nabs Hot Springs Southern Bancorp Staffers

3 min read

There’s been another mass migration from one bank to another, and this one is messier than usual.

The Citizens Bank of Batesville has hired 10 lenders and support staff away from Southern Bancorp Bank in Hot Springs.

Yes, in Hot Springs, where Citizens doesn’t even have a bank branch.

Yet.

But within a couple of years, Citizens hopes to have at least three branches in the Spa City, CEO Phil Baldwin tells us, and David Wooldridge has been hired as market president.

Baldwin was CEO of Arkadelphia-based Southern Bancorp from 2002 untill 2011. He denied having made a raid on his former employer.

Instead, he said, the team was looking to leave Southern just as Citizens was working on its plans to expand into Hot Springs and Little Rock, as well as the previously announced move into northwest Arkansas.

Southern Bancorp’s current CEO, Darrin Williams, said the exodus looked “orchestrated” or worse.

“We believe that proprietary information may have been misappropriated,” Williams told Whispers on Thursday. Regulators at the Arkansas State Bank Department and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis have been notified, Williams said, and the bank is investigating.

“That’s not true,” Baldwin said of the accusation. “We specifically told these people, ‘Don’t take anything.’

“And I asked them, and they said they didn’t.”

In leaving Southern Bancorp, Wooldridge brought SVP Brad Taylor and lenders Kristi Powal and Blake Cansler with him from Southern.

Also making the leap are Andrea Murry, Annette Shepherd and Lalainya Pumphrey, loan assistants; Mickey Miller, teller and loan assistant; Whitney Graham, senior teller; and Jess Milam, teller.

It’s the hiring of those tellers, not the luring away of lenders, that surprised Williams most.

“We usually hire tellers after we open a branch, or when we open a branch,” he said. “What do you need tellers for at a loan production office?”

And an LPO is all Citizens will have at first. It will officially open Jan. 2 in the old Merrill Lynch office on Central Avenue near the Hot Springs Mall.

But eventually, Baldwin said, Citizens plans to have full-service branches on Central, on Malvern Avenue and somewhere on the west side of town, possibly near the airport.

Meanwhile, Williams said, Southern Bancorp Bank is proceeding with plans to open its third Hot Springs branch in a former Summit Bank branch on Malvern Avenue and is rapidly moving to hire staff for it and replacements for the bankers who left.

More, More, More

Citizens, with $535 million in assets as of Sept. 30, has made no secret of its plan to be an acquirer rather than an acquiree in a banking environment that demands that almost every bank decide to be one or the other.

Baldwin said the bank expects to have six to eight branches in northwest Arkansas in the next three to five years and five to 10 in the Little Rock market.

The bank announced a couple of months back that Doug Lynch, EVP and chief lending officer since 2012, would be the northwest market president, with the first office in that region to open Feb. 1 in the former Delta Trust & Bank branch at 1676 E. Joyce Blvd.

Additional expansion, there and in central Arkansas, is likely to happen through acquisition, said Baldwin, who said he’s working on possible deals.

Whispers notes that Lynch’s brother, Jeff Lynch, runs a bank — Eagle Bank & Trust — with a half-dozen branches in the Little Rock market, as well as eight branches not too far from Batesville in Cleburne, Van Buren, White and Faulkner counties.

Baldwin said Citizens has not attempted to acquire Eagle.

You may recall that Eagle Bank did its own mass hiring back in September, taking in eight employees who left Delta Trust Mortgage after its parent was acquired by Simmons First National Bank of Pine Bluff.

You really need a scorecard to keep up with banks and bankers these days.

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